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Interview with writer Declan Croghan

"Naturally, I was excited and delighted when Susan Hogg and Trevor Eve and approached me to develop the Body Farm element as a Waking The Dead spin-off.

"The Body Farm had entered the world of Waking The Dead with the character of Eve. It was imagined that she worked on The Body Farm as well as working for the Cold Case unit. The idea of a Body Farm in Waking The Dead was inspired by the real Body Farm in Tennessee where donated bodies are placed in various crime scenes to study decomposition. The data is then used to give accurate times and causes of death in real crime investigations around the world.

"We had Eve and the Farm so the real challenge was to develop the rest of the team. Oggy, Rosa, Mike and DI Hale came into my life and shared my small writing room for a number of months. Or was it years? There was a real sense of independence about each of them. They were doing their own talking. Of course, you don't know if the dynamic will work off the page until actors bring the characters to life in the real world.

"The Gods smiled on us, we have an amazing cast. There was that wonderful and crucial tipping point in the rehearsal reading of the first episode where the actors stopped asking about the characters and started telling us about them. From that point on the characters truly belonged to the actors: they live.

"Writers Simon Tyrrell and Graham Mitchell joined the team and we formed the perfect team. The joy of the work now is to create crimes for the team to investigate and people their world with victims and perpetrators, develop emotional and intellectual journeys and let them have massive adventures."

BBC links

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